QUERY XIX
The present state of manufactures, commerce, interior and exterior trade? Manufactures We never had an interior trade of any importance. Our exterior commerce has suffered very much from the beginning of the present contest. During this time we have manufactured within our families the most necessary articles of cloathing. Those of cotton will bear some comparison with the same kinds of manufacture in Europe; but those of wool, flax and hemp are very coarse, unsightly, and unpleasant: and such is our attachment to agriculture, and such our preference for foreign manufactures, that be it wise or unwise, our people will certainly return as soon as they can, to the raising raw materials, and exchanging them for finer manufactures than they are able to execute themselves. The
political
oeconomists of Europe have established it as a principle that every
state
should endeavour to manufacture for itself: and this principle, like
many
others, we transfer to America, without calculating the difference of
circumstance
which should often produce a difference of result. In Europe the
lands are either cultivated, or locked up against the cultivator.
Manufacture must therefore be resorted to of necessity not of choice,
to
support the surplus of their people. But we have an immensity
of
land courting the industry of the husbandman. Is it best
then
that
all our citizens should be employed in its improvement, or that one
half
should be called off from that to exercise manufactures and handicraft
arts for the other? Those who labour in the
earth are the chosen
people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he
has
made
his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the
focus
in which he keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape
from the face of the earth. Corruption of morals in the mass of
cultivators
is a phaenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an
example.
It is the mark set on those, who not looking up to heaven, to their own
soil and industry, as does the husbandman, for their subsistance,
depend
for it on the casualties and caprice of customers. Dependance
begets
subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares
fit tools for the designs of ambition. This, the natural progress
and consequence of the arts, has sometimes perhaps been retarded by
accidental
circumstances: but, generally speaking, the proportion which the
aggregate
of the other classes of citizens bears in any state to that of its
husbandmen,
is the proportion of its unsound to its healthy parts, and is a
good-enough
barometer whereby to measure its degree of corruption. While we
have
land to labour then, let us never wish to see our citizens occupied at
a work-bench, or twirling a distaff. Carpenters, masons, smiths,
are wanting in husbandry: but, for the general operations of
manufacture,
let our work-shops remain in Europe. It is better to carry
provisions
and materials to workmen there, than bring them to the provisions and
materials,
and with them their manners and principles. The loss by the
transportation
of commodities across the Atlantic will be made up in happiness and
permanence
of government. The mobs of great cities add just so much to the
support
of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human
body.
It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in
vigour.
A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its
laws
and constitution. |